Frustrated by society’s unspoken rules that your pre-wedding festivities have to be with members of the same gender (all-women’s bridal showers, ladies-only bachelorette parties, etc.), I decided to buck tradition and invited over my best guy friends to help me party in style: adventuring party–style. Some of my most memorable moments have been spent around the gaming table, whether they be reveling in a...

Last weekend I flew down to Plano, Texas, for GamerNationCON 4, a tight-knit tabletop gaming convention put on by the amazing folks of the d20 Radio network. They’d invited me to the guest of honor and run some of my favorite games, as well as to give a talk on gamemastering and developing roleplaying games. I’m so happy they did, as I had a blast meeting the GamerNation tribe and getting to put some...

Like many women who are part of the hobby, my first experiences in role-playing games (RPGs) were with groups predominantly composed of men. Although I had a blast playing with them and quickly grew to love the hobby, it wasn’t until many years later that I had a chance to run games for groups that were made up of mostly women or all-women. I was shocked by how the tone of the group seemed so different...

Last weekend, NerdCon: Stories came to Minneapolis to celebrate storytelling in all its forms. As a featured guest, I got to give a talk about narrative structure in my favorite medium for telling stories: tabletop roleplaying games. Ever since I discovered tabletop RPGs, I knew I wanted to be a game master. I wanted to be the person on the other side of the screen, the one who devises the adventures and...

Triple Crit is a blog for storytellers of all sorts, be they behind the GM screen, keyboard, or character sheet. Here you can find articles and advice on campaign management, adventure design, character development, writing, and geek culture.

The author, Katrina Ostrander, is a twenty-something gamer chick, game master, and blogger working in the tabletop games industry for Fantasy Flight Games. In addition to her work as an editor of tie-in fiction, she has worked on nearly a dozen roleplaying game adventures and supplements. Her opinions are her own.